AN ACCIDENTAL HERO

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In the summer of 1940, as Europe collapsed into darkness, a Japanese diplomat sat behind a modest desk in the Lithuanian city of Kovno and faced a decision that would echo far beyond anything he could possibly imagine.

Chiune Sugihara never planned to be a hero. He was a career civil servant, with clear instructions from Tokyo not to do what he was about to do – and a young family to support. But outside the gates of the Japanese consulate, thousands of Jewish refugees waited in growing desperation. Among them were the students and teachers of the Mir Yeshiva, one of Europe’s great centers of Torah learning.

The Mir Yeshiva had already been on the run for months. After the Nazis overran eastern Poland in September 1939 and the Soviet army occupied western Poland – where Mir was located – the yeshiva’s faculty and most of its students fled, relocating first to Vilna and then to Kėdainiai, both in Lithuania.

But before long, Lithuania also fell under Soviet control, placing the yeshiva’s future in grave doubt, even as the Nazi threat loomed ominously nearby. One farsighted student, Leib Malin, argued persuasively that there was only one real option left: the yeshiva had to leave Europe, and quickly.

That idea triggered a frantic race against time and bureaucracy. Hundreds of students had no passports. Exit visas, transit visas, and destination papers were all required – documents that under normal circumstances would have been impossible to obtain – and in a wartime situation, with everyone clamoring to leave, it was practically impossible.

Yet, piece by fragile piece, the paperwork came together: temporary identity papers from British officials; entry stamps to the Caribbean island of Curaçao issued by the Dutch consul, Jan Zwartendijk; and, finally, the most critical hurdle of all – Japanese transit visas.

It was here that Chiune Sugihara suddenly found himself with a decision to make. He asked his superiors in Tokyo for permission to issue the transit visas, but they turned him down flat. He asked again, and was refused again. He tried a third time, and the answer was still no.

So he stopped asking. For weeks, he sat and wrote out the transit papers by hand, issuing visa after visa, often working eighteen hours a day. When the Soviet authorities ordered the consulate to close, he continued writing anyway.

Even as he boarded the train out of Kovno, Sugihara leaned out of the window, handing stamped visas to waiting hands on the platform. Over 6000 Jews were saved via Sugihara’s visas, including the entire Mir Yeshiva.

The most remarkable thing about it all was this: Sugihara had no idea who he was saving. Those transit visas carried the Mir Yeshiva across Siberia to Vladivostok, then by ship to Japan, and eventually to Japanese-controlled Shanghai, where the yeshiva remained until 1946.

Among the refugees were figures who would later shape the postwar Torah world in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust – Rav Chaim Shmulevitz, Rav Chatzkel Levenstein, and the Amshinover Rebbe. But mixed among them were also young men who, at the time, were nothing more than anonymous students – teenagers and twenty-somethings with no titles, no positions, and no hint of what lay ahead for them.

Rav Leib Malin – the young man who had spearheaded the push for the Mir Yeshiva to leave Europe – would later found the Beis HaTalmud yeshiva in Brooklyn.

Rav Zelig Epstein was in his mid-twenties when Sugihara issued his visa; he went on to become one of New York’s most respected yeshiva heads in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Rav Pesach Stein, barely in his early twenties in 1940, later became a rosh yeshiva at Telz Yeshiva in Cleveland.

Rav Shmuel Berenbaum had just turned twenty; he would later lead the Mir Yeshiva in New York.

None of these young men imagined leadership as they fled Lithuania, and none of them were being “saved for greatness” by Chiune Sugihara. Yet each would go on to become a towering rabbinic figure, shaping Torah life in America for decades to come.

And there were many others like them. Sugihara did not save great rabbis. He saved a group of young boys and their teachers — and history took care of the rest.

Sugihara paid dearly for his month-long visa-issuing marathon. After the war ended – and after a period of imprisonment by the Russians – he returned to Japan and was dismissed from the diplomatic service. Far away from those he had saved, Chiune Sugihara lived for years in near obscurity, initially supporting his family through a series of menial jobs, and later working as a Japanese trade representative in the Soviet Union.

But he was not forgotten. In the late 1960s, Sugihara visited Israel, where he was warmly welcomed by some of those whose lives he’d saved, including Rav Chaim Shmulevitz, head of the Mir Yeshiva, now reestablished in Jerusalem.

And in 1984, Yad Vashem formally recognized Chiune Sugihara as Righteous Among the Nations — for choosing to follow his conscience and save nameless human beings rather than protect his career.

Sugihara’s quiet heroism evokes the cast of seemingly minor characters who populate the opening chapters of Parshat Shemot. There are the midwives, Shifra and Puah, who defy Pharaoh’s orders at enormous personal risk and save nameless Hebrew babies they will never meet again.

There is Miriam, a young girl standing watch among the reeds, refusing to abandon her infant brother to fate. And there is Pharaoh’s daughter, Batya, who reaches into the Nile in an act of moral rebellion against the most powerful man in the world — her own father.

None of them set out to change history. None of them imagined themselves as architects of redemption. They were simply responding, in the moment, to cruelty they could not accept. And yet, because of their courage, a single child survived – Moses – who would grow to become the savior of his people, the lawgiver at Sinai, and the man who would lead an enslaved nation toward freedom and destiny.

Like Sugihara stamping visas in Kovno, they were not saving a future leader in their own minds. They were saving nameless lives. Only later would history reveal just how brightly what they preserved would shine.

It is no coincidence that the Torah opens the Exodus story not with Moses himself, but with the midwives who refused to carry out Pharaoh’s orders, and with the crucial roles played by Miriam and Batya. Rashi notes that the defining trait of the midwives was their fear of God – a moral stance that came before any miracles, before prophecy, and before God revealed where the unfolding story was headed.

The Torah makes clear that redemption doesn’t begin with a savior but with ordinary people who refuse to give up their humanity in the face of cruelty. Sforno adds that God often advances His purposes through figures who appear insignificant in the moment, so that those who later reflect on history do not confuse power or position with righteousness.

History rarely turns on premeditated grand gestures made with full knowledge of their consequences. More often, it is shaped by ordinary people who find themselves at a moral crossroads and then do the right thing. Chiune Sugihara did not know the futures he was preserving when he signed visa after visa in Kovno, just as Miriam and Batya could not have known that they were saving Moses, the redeemer of Israel.

The Torah’s message is deeply empowering: redemption does not wait for heroes. It begins when ordinary people, in unremarkable moments, decide that doing the right thing matters – even when no one is watching, and even when the outcome is unknown.